EKYC Solution Unpacked: How can AI help? - AI Simplified (Part 3)

One of the most important applications of fintech in recent years is the streamlining of eKYC, or Electronic Know Your Customer, where financial institutes verify their client’s profile via electronic means during the onboarding process. It is broadly considered to be the future of Know your Customer for a number of reasons. For instance, its digital nature largely reduces the costs and time spent in the traditional KYC process. Moreover, eKYC solutions have the technological capability to identify counterfeiting attempts, phishing and relevant crimes, which have proven to be very common.

What does a typical KYC process look like?

For a bank, the client onboarding process for corporate and SME clients can be tedious and time-consuming. In Hong Kong, the bank has to do a company search on eTAX and ICRIS systems, which are the official corporate database. The bank then purchases relevant documents and transfers the raw files into their internal system. The most up-to-date information has to be extracted from these raw files that the analysts downloaded from the database in order to evaluate a client.

This is inefficient!

To start off, it is not unusual for a bank to accidentally use information that may not be up-to-date, and current market solutions lack a cross-check system to ensure data integrity. In addition, the low scan quality of the documents submitted by the client can often lead to compromised data accuracy. Furthermore, analysts performing repetitive tasks such as text extraction, annual check and fraud detection often leads to human errors due to the nature of the tasks. Regularly, extra manpower is required to manage the surge in cases, which is another obstacle that needs to be dealt with before a bank can optimize its KYC process flow.

In conclusion, the traditional KYC process is highly inefficient and often prone to mistakes. Hence banks are actively seeking adaptable solutions that cause the current processes minimum disturbance.

How can eKYC solve these challenges?

The AI adopted in eKYC can tackle multiple challenges mentioned in the previous paragraphs through automation. For instance, the Superacc robot can pass the human check and access the ICRIS and eTax platform, the AI twisting module can correct documents and correct them to the appropriate angle for scanning and machine analysis. It also has a built-in OCR (Optical Character Recognition) model which is trained to process Chinese and English texts simultaneously. Once completed, the system can be deployed in an in-house, private cloud system to ensure data is processed and stored in a customized, trusted environment.

So what?

With the help of eKYC solutions, a large part of the eKYC process is automated, allowing middle offices to relocate their human resources from repetitive data extraction to more value-adding tasks.

It just takes an average of 3-6 months of managing the eKYC process with Superacc to realise the impacts it brings. There will be a significant increase in KYC document data accuracy and the client onboarding process will be sped up. This in turn cuts costs for client onboarding.